Designing Platforms in an Age of Institutional Failure
Reflections from the 35th Chaos Communication Congress
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The Chaos Communication Congress
500 G/s, 286 Access Points, 9 Routers, 186 Switches to serve 24.939 unique MAC addresses…
62 antennas to serve 129.000 DECT calls, 10.400 SIP calls, and 17.000 GSM calls…
3 cameras per stage, 142 microphones, 15 output mixes, 5TB Audio Backup, 56 mobile belt packs, 33 fixed panels, 18 wireless antennas running in multicast to serve 6 stages for a total of 205 Talks and 79 hours of content.
—— from 35c3 Infrastructure Review
This a just a fraction of the astonishing infrastructures and capabilities that you need to run something like the Chaos Communication Congress concluded in Leipzig a week ago. At its 35th edition, the Congress is a temporary zone that lasts four days each year in the period between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
The Congress is not a place, but the beautiful entrenchment of some of the deepest content update on technological systems and the radical self-expression and diversity of congress goers. It certainly represents one of the most interesting countercultural platforms alive these days, while its underlying ethics, “be always excellent to each other” and “all creatures are welcome”, synthesizes what more than 30 years of the Internet can breed in the real world.
To me it is always a tremendously soothing feeling to go back: I strengthened very important friendships that made me feel at home, and it’s where I fell in love with the person that is now my wife.
If you manage, take the chance to not stress out trying to attend to every talk or following up to every possible conversation that started. This year the Congress hosted more than 16'000 people from all over the world, covering 205 official talks for 79 hours of content in just four days. If you add a scooter or a pair of rollerblades it’s very easy to imagine the space of possible conversations that one can have here.
Defusing all my plans of keeping my cortices selectively stimulated with just a few signals, I anyway ended up with a ton of reflections I will elaborate here. Some of these are reported in this initial post. Others, more in-depth, are connected and branch out from this major reflection so will definitely require a proper dedicated space.
The Urgent Questions
The set of ‘urgent questions’ that I patiently held with me in 2018 are the ones around the hard problems of collective agency.
To begin with, the question I left open at the end of a paper I published with Guillⓐume Dumⓐs and Jie Mei about one year ago on Arxiv, “Systems of global governance in the era of human-machine convergence” is:
How and if collective systems learn?
Asking if, in which measure, and how systems have agency is consequential to asking whether or not they can learn.
Throughout this year I’ve been collecting answers inside and outside. After the life-changing experience of working three times with the United Nations Development Program in East Asia on the rolling out of their (complex, very complex) Strategic Plan, and after many serendipitous conversations with old and new friends, these questions have sparked a whole new universe of ecosystemic connections inside and around me. This set of questions entails a purpose, the same purpose that I can sense resonating in the beautiful work of many others, near or far. I’m now sure these themes will follow me for a while.
Having at least the questions clear in mind, this year at the Congress I held this question while keeping my self to the ground. I enjoyed the Food Hacking Base kitchen cooking some tasty treats for my beloved ones. I deliberately decided to only follow three/four specific talks relevant to these themes and a couple of I’d say “systemic” workshops. For the rest, I let it all happen and it was beautiful. It’s great to confirm once again that the Congress remains a place where the level of conversations around these topics is very high.
Building Platforms in the Age of Institutional Failure
The question on the possibility of collective agency comes from the clear realization that — at the verge of human extinction — out there there’s a world in desperate need to be healed, soothed and re-built of its major critical systems. To what extent this endeavor will need an architect or can self emerge is still an open question. Nevertheless, when 20th Century Institutions have tremendously failed in coping with the evolution of economic and technological history we need to ask who will?
At the moment, it is clear that while worldwide grassroots communities such as the active neighborhoods, the commoners, as well as the decentralization maximalists are busy trying to reimagine and prototype a new world, traditional corporations, especially large technology companies are more or less consciously finding themselves in filling up the institutional gap. Increasingly, their concentration of power alongside the inability of traditional public institutions to understand and leverage on technological evolution is directly or indirectly enabling big tech companies to define their own rules. In this article I draw from talks and conversations happened at the congress, presenting some of the historical reasons for the contemporary situation.
I argue that blaming one side or the other is of no practical utility. The institutional and civic impasse contributing to the erosion of the — already weak — power of the state is not due to big tech schemes. The reason for me is that we are not taking the duty of building 21st Century critical systems and institutions on our own.
On one side we surely need tremendous efforts to ignite what my friend Indy Johar calls the Big, Boring, Beyond Borders, Bureaucratic Revolution. These efforts are crucial and must be carried out at any cost, but as these initiatives come from traditional institutions they might be too slow and not reach the right momentum to realistically engage and enable everyone in time.
For this reason, what we need is more folks active in building the future of our critical systems. If you feel something is fundamentally broken in our society you should feel automatically entitled to try fixing it without waiting from some institutional permission. That’s what active neighborhoods, hacker assemblies, and grassroots communities of commoners are trying to do. We need more of this.
Particularly relevant and overlapping are some passages from this webinar we did with the Civic Design Course a few weeks ago.
As we already mentioned, the long tail of development might be based on permissionless innovations and open frameworks for the ecosystem to use: to self-organize, interact, exchange value and learn collectively to (autonomously) provide contextualized solutions in their reality.
In this and following notes, I’ll try to articulate some open questions on how we can build better critical systems with respect to our understanding of platforms and platform design.
How did this happen?
Let’s take one step back: how did the major social infrastructures break up? To understand some of the reason how we ended up in this trajectory of development, the opening talk of Prof. Guy Standing comes handy.
Prof. Guy Standing, economist and co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network opened the Congress with a very energetic talk, which I enjoyed and of which I share the historical analysis. However, I find the conclusions a bit counterintuitive. He proposes a Universal Basic Income and “big, big” carbon taxes as the solution to everything, while I‘m skeptic as these two solutions imply that a strong — and stable — public institution exists, and that it is able to design incentive systems that are able to influence the pace of technology in the socio-economic context. At this moment in history, I strongly doubt this is the case. Let alone that I’m generally a skeptic of one size fits all solutions, I also don’t find constructive to scapegoat the private sector for the current situation, as in the same measure one can state that the public wasn’t able to carry out effective policymaking. Both statements are factually true. But I’m afraid we don’t have much time to enjoy the conversation or blaming one side or the other. We need to stop talking and take our own responsibilities in building 21st-century institutions.
Nevertheless, in line with the main theme of the Congress “Refreshing Memories”, Prof. Standing recap a useful historical analysis that explains how we got to this point.
In brief, Standing reminded us of the pivotal widespread of neoliberalist policies in the ’70s and in the ’80s, the globalization of financial markets, the subsequentially (long) technological wave, the resulting dynamization of financial capital, and in particular the passage of WTO’s TRIPS agreement, which essentially globalized the American system of Intellectual Property Rights with patents, with copyright, with brands, and with all of the adages that go with that. This series of chained events is at the origin of the disproportionate strengthening of the power of capital over labor which fundamentally broke down the income distribution system of the 20th Century. Indeed, as Standing reminds, wages have been stagnating for three decades in all industrialized countries, and today are lower in real wage terms than the ’80s. Simultaneously, this newly reformed IP-based financial systems ushered the self-reinforcing cycles that led us to a world where 1/4 of the Global GDP (and counting) is attributable to Intellectual Capital, which as a consequence represents the major source of what Standing calls the plundering of the commons.
If we see this number from another perspective, we know that the market value of S&P 500s is compounded by a staggering >84% of Intangible Assets, according to a famous Ocean Tomo report. Seeing from this IP-based perspective is key to understand what Standing call the plundering of the commons. What we define as ‘Intangible Assets’ includes the value of Intellectual capital (which comprehends a corporation’s processes, knowledge, assets and preference rights) and the Brand Value (which basically represent the influence of its identity and relationships in the world, in other words, its Reputation). Intangibles are nothing less than the individual, corporate or government lawful preference rights on the exploitation of the commons. To misquote Indy Johar, despite we think to look at a growing world of intangibles what instead we’re looking at, it’s the preposterous growing value of the material property, especially land, as the proxy to access these intangibles. The first big technology companies and their spiritual contemporary offsprings are undoubtedly the ones that mostly supported and now benefiting from this great globalized virtualization process started in the ’70s. Yet, only less than a decade ago their power seemed to significantly enter the domain of global governance.
If you want to catch up with the topic and understand how platforms are influencing our ethical deliberation mechanisms you’ll find some nice reads on the growing institutional importance of platforms in our annual recap published two weeks ago.
Frank Pasquale depicted how companies like Amazon are marking the transition From Territorial to Functional Sovereignty: in other words, their growth is marking the factual shift of power from state to corporate actors, with all the consequences in the erosion of democracy that can be easily imagined.
As a matter of fact, today’s big tech are rentiers concentrating a disproportionate amount of wealth that in turn reinforce their power in negotiating not only the control of the income pile, but directly or indirectly disarming the policy-making process, its underlying ethical deliberation mechanisms, and the fundamental access to rights.
I want to end up this reflection by commenting on this passage from Standing’s talk at 35c3:
The precariat is losing the rights of citizenship often without realising it.
They’re losing cultural rights because they cannot belong to organizations that represent their cultural identity or aspirations.
They’re losing civil rights because they cannot get access to due process and legal justice.
They’re losing social rights because they don’t have access to rights-based benefits and services.
They’re losing economic rights because they cannot practice what they are perfectly qualified to do.
And above all they’re losing political rights because they don’t see out there politicians or political parties that represent what they are and what they want to be.
—— Guy Standing, The Precariat: A Disruptive Class for Disruptive Times
My perspective is that there’s no way we’re going to get back these rights by knocking at the door of institutions or corporations. Both they will likely direct us to a dysfunctional algorithmic call center.
Certainly, corporations are plundering the commons and eroding the social and cognitive capital with little back in return, but they’re doing so more for their inertia than for their evil cunning. On the other side, we have public institutions that have no understanding nor capabilities to cope with the pace of the present. Now, one can choose to blame one side or the other. I did both and to a certain extent, I keep doing it when I’m angry. Nonetheless, realizing this impasse is precisely why I think is pointless wasting time in these discussions. Our only way out is to lucidly realize that — as designers in an era of institutional failure — willingly or not, we’re all designing institutions. Everyone should feel this duty, this entitlement of building the 21st Century institutions, not only big techs who found themselves in the unpleasant and certainly dangerous position of doing so for everyone else.
The Quest for Collective Agency
So, since a while, I’m asking to what extent society, organizations, and more generally collectives of people and machines, are able to achieve collective agency?
In simple terms, in which ways collectives (i.e. human and/or machines) can acquire, store and leverage upon the information of the environment they depend on, in order to predict and undertake trajectories that allow them to survive?
Answering ‘what is collective agency?’ is a very interesting effort to me because, it lays the foundations of defining things like collective intelligence and collective consciousness, both ultimately necessary to understand what are the features our systems need to have to drift humanity away from the extinction trajectory we’re currently heading to.
I’m not the only one who believes we’re close to a good understanding of what collective agency could mean, or at least look like so that we can have an actionable framework for things like avoiding human extinction. My friend Nora Bateson came up with a word for how living systems learn: Symmathesy, of which you can read the extensive ongoing research here.
The need for this word and its articulation emerges from the substantial difference in the type of systemic approach one needs while dealing with living systems as compared to not living ones. More generally, and drawing from Nora’s thinking, my feeling is that we can apply this approach all the times we’re dealing with systems that contextually influence each other without reaching a final state of arrangement but that mutually learn from each other in continuous interrelationality.
Nevertheless, the year that just ended marked for me a fundamental passage in the understanding of these questions. In my job, I constantly deal with world-leading organizations in both the private and public sector, all sharing a fundamental strategic objective:
how we make sense of the resources we have to mobilize the largest number of people we can in order to increase the influence of our agenda in the world? In simpler terms, how do we build powerful platforms?
Whether it’s increasing market dominance, exploring new business models, assuring the organization’s resilience in the next decade or pulling the world towards Sustainable Development Goals we aim at being agnostic in what we do, we aim at being agnostic in what we do. We try to not discriminate between an entity or another. We get hands dirty as the end of the day we learn from everyone, from the most traditional conglomerate to the most emblazoned humanitarian organization we often reset our biases in what we believe is an organization that worth serving.
In a nutshell, what we do is to bring them to the point where they (hopefully) realize the tremendous potential that they have in catalyzing relationships, in literally “Connecting People ” (and machines!). We believe that no matter where each of these organization or individuals come from, a world where more entities are connected to each other, the more high-level value is produced and exchanged, and the more excellence in relationships and transparency get nurtured in our shared systems.
In following notes, I’ll share more of the conversations and reflections I had at the Congress focusing on my current understanding of collective agency and what it means for the design of 21st Century critical systems.
For the moment I conclude by saying that I love the Chaos Communication Congress because I always come out with clarity, if not certainties, on the purpose and the questions to ask myself. I hope to see more of you there too!
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